Sofia Hu: 'Being in such a diverse community has helped me become a more empathetic, curious, and engaged person.'

Sofia Hu

College Scholar & Biological Sciences

Braga, Portugal

What is your main extracurricular activity? Why is it important to you?

I've been a part of The Cornell Daily Sun for all 4 years, starting from writer to news editor and editor-in-chief. I firmly believe that journalism is a public service that is invaluable to building an engaged and democratic community. Writing and editing for The Sun has given me an amazing, if challenging, opportunity, to pursue the stories I care about alongside similarly curious peers. The Sun is a home of students dedicated to a larger cause, and we support each other as we try, and fail, and try again to put together something meaningful and informative for the Cornell and Ithaca community.

How did any of your beliefs or interests change during your time at Cornell?

Being in such a diverse community as Cornell has helped me become a more empathetic, curious, and engaged person. I think so many of my beliefs and interests have changed that I will never be able to fully understand how much I've grown in the past 4 years.

What do you value about your liberal arts education?

A liberal arts education allows you to connect the dots between seemingly disparate fields of study and aspects of life. Right now, I'm taking a Society of Humanities class about media, which has pushed me to think about the experience of the body and time in the 21st century. This in turn has helped me to think about what I'm learning in a Science & Technology Studies class about capitalism; which has led me to think about the biopolitics of life and the yeast experiments I'm conducting in my genetics lab course. This all reminds me of poetry written by natural philosophers from the English Enlightenment that I read for an English class last semester...you get the picture! A liberal arts education never leaves you hanging.